An optical transceiver is a carrier used for signal transmission between a router and a network device, and mainly implements a conversion between an optical signal and an electrical signal. As a capacity of the network device increases, a processing rate of the router and a capacity of a single cable clip will rapidly increase to 1 Terabit per second (Tbps), 2 Tbps, or even 4 Tbps in a few years, and a high-capacity optical transceiver also needs to be configured for the router to implement optical interconnection. Therefore, implementation of the high-capacity optical transceiver is a current technology development direction.
Currently, there are two main methods for resolving a high-capacity optical transceiver problem. One is using a large-granularity pluggable optical transceiver, and the other is multiplexing multiple small-granularity optical transceivers. A large granularity means that an optical transceiver has a relatively high capacity, such as 1 Tbps. A small granularity means that an optical transceiver has a relatively small capacity, such as 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps).
However, costs of using a large-granularity pluggable optical transceiver to implement a high-capacity optical transceiver are greatly higher than costs of multiplexing multiple small-granularity optical transceivers. In addition, a demand for a large-granularity pluggable optical transceiver is limited to signal transmission only between an Optical Transmission Network (OTN) and a core router, and only a limited quantity is demanded. Little usage leads to a lack of motivation to reduce costs of a large-granularity pluggable optical transceiver. Moreover, it takes a relatively long time to develop a large-granularity pluggable optical transceiver, and consequently, a cable clip update requirement cannot be met. If a high-capacity transceiver is implemented by multiplexing multiple small-granularity optical transceivers, a router needs to manage and configure multiple optical interfaces, and this increases optical interface management complexity. In addition, because each optical interface and a peer network device need to be interconnected using a fiber corresponding to the optical interface, a fiber resource for point-to-point interconnection is wasted.